Week #10 New York

Hello my amazing family! This week has been such an improvement on the week before! I have not very much time because we have a dinner appointment soon with some members of the ward. Wow this week we have been able to get busy and start helping people come unto Christ! We spent alot of monday unpacking and cleaning the apartment. Our apartment was such a mess with spiderwebs everywhere. It was embarrassing. I remember I hated the feeling of our apartment and so I prayed that the apartment would have a better feeling and spiritual atmosphere to it. In response to my prayer we just started cleaning like mad! after all was said and done the apartment felt like a totally different place to me. As the scriptures say the Spirit of the Lord cannot dwell in unholy or unclean places. That night we suited up and went and walked a few miles at about 7 at night in the freezing weather. We went and contacted a less active family and set up an appointment to teach their daughter. She is 9 and wants to be baptized when she turns 10 in may. We spent alot of time this last week visiting less active members and fellowshipping recent converts. Most members sure enjoy having the missionaries over and we have a hard time leaving on time after we have taught them a bit and have given them a spiritual thought and commited them to try and come back to church or read the Book of Mormon or to pray. They sure like chatting and comment on how they love having the missionaries over. There really is a special light that comes with us as we enter homes of many people. I can definatly tell the difference of when we enter a home with a worthy priesthood holder and when we enter homes that don't have the priesthood. Since our area contains alot of military members there are many active lds soldiers and families. We are fed every day at dinner. There homes feel so good to be in. The Gospel really makes everything so lovely. I'm sorry again there isn't much time and we are at the library and we don't get the chance to come here until about 5:30. I tracted my first neighborhood saturday morning at about 11. We had an appointment fall through (which happens fairly often) and our backup was to tract. So we went and tracted. Surprisingly very few people were home for a saturday. But we had about 7 or 8 that answered the door. All were fairly polite but all declined and said they weren't interested or were already members of another church. The Door I first knocked on was an older gentleman probably about 70. This is more or less what I said. '"Hi! We're Mormon missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We are out today sharing a message of Jesus Christ and of families, and how families can be together forever. Is this something that you would be interested in learning more about?" He was nice and told me he knew about our church because his son in law was a mormon and he had even given him a "Mormon Bible" I told him it was the Book of Mormon and that it was an excellent book. I should have probably born more of my testimony but I was so flustered and my mind was racing at a million miles per hour. I gave him a mormon.org pass along card and invited him to check it out. He said he would do that. After we left his door I felt great inside. I felt peace and love from the Lord. Somehow I wasn't even nervous when I knocked on the door. The Lord sure does bless us and is always aware of us. The rest of the tracting went about the same. We did it for about an hour. No one was really interested but we asked many of them if the knew of anyone that was in need of some service. They all said they didn't but hopefully we left and impression on them. Maybe in the future they will think of our smiling faces and think of us in a positive way. I'm going to try and upload some pictures for you so hopefully it works out. We got a call on Friday at about 9 pm from president saying that there was going to be an emergency transfer and that one of our companions Elder King was going to be leaving by 9:30 the next morning to fill the needed transfer. I guess an Elder was going home for some reason. So now I am just in a regular companionship with Elder Menlove from Arizona. He is a good chill guy and we get along really good. We had alot of fun in our trio and we all laughed alot. I was sad to see it go, but there is a reason the norm is going out two by two. Church was good yesterday I love church. I have been going about twice a week to a family in our ward named the gabbituss's. Their dad went to portugal on his mission and so we do language study at his house. I will listen to him and it's fun and good for the both of us. Ok I have to go now I'm sorry. Thanks so much for your prayers. I pray for you all everyday. Tell Jordan and Kaiden to be careful in eveything they do. I have been praying so much for you all to be safe and be protected physically and spiritually. The Church is True. I love the Gospel and missionary work. Even thought its the hardest thing I have ever had to do so far in my life. But I know the Savior is with us every step of the way. Amo Voces!
-Elder Kennington